Beer Reviews, Homebrew, Rambling

Homebrew: Wedding IPA – American IPA

Yesterday I brewed the fifth and final batch of beer for my wedding in August (see previous posts for the Wedding Pils, Wedding Blond, Wedding Hybrid, and Wedding APA): an American IPA loaded with hops and fermented with Conan. I’ve brewed a slightly similar recipe before (see here), and while it was a nice beer, it ended up a bit too sweet with WLP007. This time I’m changing up the hop bill slightly based on what I have in the freezer, and I’ll be fermenting the wort with Conan. I’m hoping for a hoppy and bitter IPA, with loads of fruity aromas from both the hops and the yeast.

The malt bill is similar to the APA I brewed last week, and it consists of Maris Otter, Munich, CaraPils and CaraAmber. I mashed quite low (63C) in order to get a very fermentable wort. I’ve used Conan a couple of times before and I’ve ended up with around 78% attenuation. I aimed for an original gravity just below 1.070, in order to get a beer with around 7.5% ABV. For the hops, I chose to bitter with Herkules (using up the last from a 100g bag), added some Cascade and Centennial during the boil, and at flameout I added even more Cascade and Centennial together with some Amarillo. The bitterness levels should be around 70-80 IBU, depending on how much the whirlpool hops contribute. I pitched a 1.5L starter of Conan after I had cooled the wort down to around 20C. I placed the fermenter in my fermentation fridge and set the fermentation temperature to 19C. I checked the fermenter 24 hours later, and it was fermenting violently with krausen coming out of the airlock. After a quick clean-up things were looking good again. Man it was smelling good inside the fermentation fridge!